“In childhood, I was a clown”

I am about 6 years old in this photo, taken at my maternal grandmother, Françoise, in Eygalières, in the Alpilles, where she has lived for almost fifty years. It’s the vacation home, the home of the women in my family. Beautiful nature, a large field where we did what we wanted, in summers that seemed to me to last a year – a lost paradise…

With my cousins ​​and my sisters, whom I adore, including my youngest, Clara, whom we see here by my side, we were always in the trees, pretty daredevil, we made cabins, we played Indians. The rest of the time, we ate my grandmother’s chicken in jelly – who we nicknamed “Mimime” –, we watched TV on her big sofa.

I definitely look happy to be photographed with my arms outstretched, while Clara looks at me sideways, under her bell hat, as if to say: “What’s wrong with you? be in such a good mood? “I took up a lot of space, it must be said… I was also told that when I arrived at the maternity ward, the day of her birth, my body was suddenly covered in plaques. To my mother, panicked at the idea that I have an allergy, the nurse replied: “No, no, she has a much more banal reaction: jealousy! »

Pleasure and freedom of play

In childhood, I was a clown. I was very connected to the pure pleasure of the game as a teenager, becoming aware of the notoriety of my mother [l’actrice Charlotte de Turckheim]I wanted to do everything except his job.

Then, it was a tortuous road, it took me time to assume to play. I was studying [de journalisme] to reassure my parents, music with a friend. It was my cousin Éric, with whom I spent so many summers in Eygalières, who ended up saying to me one day: “You can’t miss your true desire, you have to go for it! »

I was already 19 when I took my first acting lessons. I remember the excitement, the joy mixed with fear, when I spent with one of my best friends, Wise women transposed into public toilets, at the Théâtre La Bruyère, in the class of Francine Walter, who was watching us behind her big glasses with pink and orange frames. Absolute feeling of freedom!

Ever since I started playing, my grandmother watches everything I shoot, absolutely everything. She comes to the screenings, seated in the front row, making comments while speaking loudly as if it were just the two of us. She is a very earthy woman, both chic and simple, whose family, quite bourgeois but rural, comes from Fontainebleau and who was an executive secretary then a freelancer and courageously brought up her four children after my grandfather taken the tangent.

With her, conversations are always free. She can be a bit brittle, with this habit of giving the trick, like my mother: we don’t dwell on the problems, we move forward with dignity, we live surrounded by friends… She is very upright, sometimes rough. If you take her in your arms and say to her: ” You know I love you “she stiffens, answers: ” Yes Yes me too “, and hurry to move on.

A few years ago, I went to squat at her place, like a homecoming. Pregnant, I wanted to be closer to my family and I decided to give birth there, in the south of France. I needed to be reassured by his strength and wanted to steal moments of life from him.

I lived with her for a while, then I moved into a house not far away in the village. It lasted four years, finally – I have just returned to Paris. So it was there, in the field you can see in the photo, that I taught my son to walk. With the feeling of a paradise found.